


Begin Again

by EarthToQuinne



Series: Begin Again [2]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: F/M, First Dates, Fluff, Gender Identity, Getting Together, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Mutual Pining, Nonbinary Character, Other, Past Abuse, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24472042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthToQuinne/pseuds/EarthToQuinne
Summary: It's more than a first date, it's a new beginning.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Series: Begin Again [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1767574
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21





	Begin Again

It was warm for April and Gee had the windows open, mid-morning sun peeking through the curtains as she got ready for the day. One of her favorite records played softly in the living room and she hums along to one of the old songs she used to love but stopped listening to a long time ago because Alex had hated it. She thought about all of the things she gave up, all of things she sacrificed in the past two years as she put on her makeup, buttons up her dress. She was wearing a long sundress, with a cinched waist and a small, floral pattern that made her look elegant and feminine. It had been one of the first dresses she ever bought for herself and she’d only worn it out in public once before. 

It was different from anything else she owned, softer, less revealing. In a way, it was harder to wear this dress than any of the others because it was comfortable and casual, the kind of dress one would wear to go out grocery shopping or see a school play. When she wore it, she didn’t feel like she was performing femininity, she felt  _ feminine _ . She felt like herself, truly, for the first time in a long time. She took a deep breath as she looked at herself in the mirror, with her light and subtle makeup, simple winged liner, nude lipstick. 

Although getting ready like this was something she had done many times before, this time felt different. While part of her worried about what Frank would think, seeing her in the daylight exposed and free from all of her glamour and disguises, she didn’t have anything to prove anymore. This was something she was doing for herself. 

Her phone buzzed on the dresser as she decided what shoes to wear- sneakers or heels- and then she chastised herself for overthinking so much about a coffee date. She thought about it for a moment and then quickly chose the heels, a pair of light brown wedges that matched perfectly with the yellow flowers on the dress. 

**Frank Iero 🖤:** _ Good morning, Gee! I can’t wait to see you today! :) _

She smiled uncontrollably as she finished getting ready and locked up her apartment. She took another deep breath as she slipped her headphones in, letting the music calm her down. Alex said he never "got" this song, that it was too "poppy," "too shallow." She turned the volume up a little louder as she stepped out into the sunshine, the breeze tickling her face and blowing the fabric of her skirt around her ankles. 

The sky was so blue today, filled with big, fluffy clouds. The trees were starting to grow buds again, and the flower boxes that lined the sidewalk were full of flowers, just about to bloom. The world felt like it was finally starting to come alive again, and Gee was too. 

The cafe they had agreed to meet at was just a few blocks from Gee's apartment. She came here all the time and often spent hours curled up in one of the booths by the window, drinking pot after pot of coffee as she worked on a new project or article. Most of the staff knew her by name, and would often bring her free refills when they had an extra pot. 

So she had no reason to feel as nervous as she did when she got to the entrance of Brightside and realized that this was it. Their first official  _ date _ , after weeks of texting and getting to really know each other.  _ He's just a guy _ , she reminded herself. Albeit a very handsome, charming, and thoughtful guy. But  _ just _ a guy. 

Alright so maybe he was the first guy she'd seen since her break up with Alex over a year ago and this meant a lot more to her than she was letting herself acknowledge. But-

Gee stopped herself from going into another panic spiral. He was probably going to be late anyways, she reasoned, so she would have more than enough time to go sit down and collect herself. However, when she finally walked in, she saw Frank sitting at one of the tables near the window, framed in sunlight, reading a book. He must have gotten there early, she thought, and he stood and waved when he saw her, his smile as warm as the afternoon light spilling through the bay window. 

She felt her heart do a silly little skip in her chest as their eyes met and swallowed the lump in her throat as she walked over. They hugged lightly in greeting and Frank pulled out a chair for her and helped her in, like the true gentleman he was. It made her feel like a real lady, if only for a moment. Just then, she felt herself start to blush before she even had the chance to sit down, butterflies swarming in her stomach. 

"You look so beautiful today," Frank said as he looked at her with a sense of wonder she didn't deserve. 

Gee's face only grew redder as she looked away in embarrasment. "Oh stop it!" she mused with a nervous laugh. 

"I mean it, that dress looks lovely on you," Frank paused to take a sip from his water glass. "Although you always look lovely- but that goes without saying."

She smiled so widely that it almost hurt her face as she slipped off her jacket and draped it over the back of the chair along with her purse.

"Oh Frankie, you'll give me a big head if you keep saying things like that." She didn't even realize the pet name until it slipped out, but Frank didn't seem to mind. The conversation lulled for a moment as they gazed at each other with bright eyes. Gee quickly shook herself out of it. "I didn't expect you to get here so early, I didn't even have time to powder my nose," she mused.

"Well, truthfully, I  _ was _ really excited to meet you so that may have contributed a bit. But also, what gentleman makes a lady wait on him?" 

He smiled at her again, more with his eyes than with his mouth and she was struck once again by how incredibly beautiful he was. However, not even that word fit quite right. Frank's beauty was timeless, like an actor from an old Hollywood movie. His eyes were soft and more green than brown, but they changed color in the light as he moved. She remembered thinking how brown his eyes were in the darkness of the club, but now they were lighter, sparkling, and the color of the forest after a fresh spring rain. He also had the grace and charm of a man who could've been dropped straight from the 1920's, a true gentleman in an age where the phenomenon was not quite as common. To say that she was smitten with him so soon would have been a vast understatement. 

"That's… so sweet of you," Gee said quietly as she smoothed down the front of her dress in an attempt to hide how badly her hands were shaking.

"Nah, just being decent," Frank shrugged. If it had been any other man saying this to her, Gee would've thought that they were just telling her what they thought she wanted to hear. But with Frank she could tell it was genuine- everything about him was. 

She managed to stop ogling long enough to suggest going up to the counter to order their drinks. Gee loved this place because it was locally owned and vegan, and also just charming as hell. Frank studied the menu pensively, at a loss as he scanned the menu board, looking smaller than usual with his back craned up to read the signs. It was incredibly endearing. 

"See anything you like?" she asked. 

He looked back at her and held her gaze for a moment before grinning. "I sure do."

Gee felt her face flush as her tongue turned to putty in her mouth. "Um I uh- Well..." she swallowed thickly, collecting herself. "I'm a sucker for a good chai latte. The one they have here is amazing. If I could inject it directly into my veins I would."

Frank's respondent laugh was genuine and came from the gut, a full bodied kind of laugh that she didn't quite understand. She wasn't particularly funny, but he still seemed to think so.

"Well, I'll take your word for it then." They both ordered matching lattes and Frank insisted on paying, despite Gee's protests. 

As they waited for their drinks Gee insisted, "You'll have to let me cover the next one, Frank." Gee said with a sly grin. It was awfully presumptuous of her, but Frank hadn't seemed to be scared away by her forwardness the night they'd met, or in any of hundreds of texts they'd exchanged in the past few weeks. 

"Oh definitely." Frank returned her smile, sending another explosion of butterflies fluttering in her stomach. It felt like a promise, though she tried to quell the excitement that stirred within her at the thought.

They made small talk with the barista as she made their drinks, which provided Gee a nice reprieve from her own silly nerves. When they returned back to their table, with two large steaming mugs Gee took her first sip to find that the milk was the perfect temperature and the tea just the right balance of sweet and spicy. She moaned audibly and licked the foam off her lips. Frank grinned with an arched eyebrow and she found herself giggling. 

"Oh don't act like that was a preview!" She teased. 

"Damn it!" he replied, with an equal amount of laughter in his voice, his smile coy and oh so charming. 

"If you behave, we'll see," she flashed him a bright smile, regaining some of her charm. Frank took a sip from his own mug and she swore she could see his cheeks redden the slightest bit. 

Over the next few hours, they talked about everything that couldn't be said through text, rambling on about their shared interests. It was far too easy to want to open up to Frank, to truly wear her heart proudly upon her sleeve like she often pretended to. Frank on the other hand, was an open book, holding out himself for Gee with little restraint. He was clearly proud of his accomplishments and his passions, and Gee was genuinely interested in his stories about his work. 

Frank owned an independent record store and was working on expanding to another location in a nearby town. He had been dropping hints here and there in their text conversations, but when Gee brought it up that day, he didn't try to contain his excitement. Frank was in the middle of telling Gee about his plans for his store when he stopped abruptly. 

"Gee, I am  _ so _ sorry. I've been talking about myself for the past twenty minutes," he ran a hand through his hair, clearly exasperated at himself. 

Gee smiled gently, wanting so badly to place her fingers in his upturned palm that rested on the table, to trace the deep lines that ran across it, but she resisted. "No, it's alright. I don't mind. It's something you clearly care about a lot."

"But right now I care about getting to know you more," he said genuinely. There was that broken, twisted up part of Gee that told her it was all an act. She tried her best to ignore it and ducked her head as her cheeks began to heat up once more. 

"Well um-" she took a shaky sip of her drink as she searched for some kind of resolve. "What do you want to know about me?"

Frank rested his chin in his palm and gazed at her thoughtfully. "Is ‘everything’ an acceptable answer?" 

She giggled, fucking  _ giggled _ at this, much to her own horror. "Let's narrow down our options for now," she chided. 

"Hmm well… what are you passionate about, Gee Way?" 

She suddenly blanked, unable to remember any significant interests, hobbies, or goals. She couldn't remember her favorite color, even her name. Then she looked up from her brief moment of panic and gazed into Frank's eyes, bright and warm and found her voice again. 

"Well I um… I always had a love affair with words for most of my life. I was a fairly lonely kid growing up, so I… read a lot of books." That was a vast understatement. As a child, she had ferociously devoured books, reading absolutely anything she could get her hands on. Frank looked at her expectantly as he clearly waited for her to continue, but she just blushed and hid behind her cup as she took another careful sip of her coffee, careful not to smudge her lipstick.

"What kind of books did you read?" Frank asked with a gentle smile. 

"Oh absolutely everything. I read picture books and fairy tales. Mysteries and thrillers. I also really adored those really bad pulp horror and sci-fi novels with the ridiculous covers from the 80s, even though they tended to give me nightmares. My mom tried to take them away from me many times but I always just found more. I spent most of my summers reading at the library." 

Gee knew that she had started to ramble, but once she got started it was almost impossible to stop until the conversation careened and crashed into a dead end. Alex had always told her as much, anyway.

"All of the librarians loved me. I was this tiny, chubby little thing, wandering around this giant public library by myself. I used to park my bike outside in the little bike rack and drive home with all my books in the basket until it got stolen..." There was no possible way that Frank cared about any of this information. It was random, irrelevant… Still, he seemed to hang onto her every word and gazed at her intently as she spoke. 

"Damn, that's rough. You grew up in Jersey right?" 

Gee nodded, "Yeah, my parents lived in Newark for a while, but I spent the summers in Belleville with my grandmother." 

"I grew up in Belleville, actually. I always thought it was the tenth circle of hell growing up," Frank shook his head. "But what did you think?"

The smell of blooming cherry blossoms and freshly cut grass mixed with jasmine still brought back strong memories of childhood, even after all those years away from it. She could still hear the distant sound of clinking of china, the smell of freshly baked bread and strawberry jam carried on the summer breeze as she sat on her grandmother's front porch, curled up in the swing, writing stories in dozens of spiral bound notebooks in various stages of disarray. Countless hours had been spent writing stories, crafting worlds brighter and better than her own.

“At times it felt like our own little corner of the world, but we were never allowed to play outside the yard. What I was allowed to see was peaceful but it was… isolating.” Frank’s patient, understanding smile only seemed to open the floodgates further, and then she found herself telling him all about her lonely summers that fueled her passion for writing. 

She told him about her favorite books, and he shared his. They quickly bonded over their mutual love of comics, and Gee confessed that she had always wanted to write one. She told him about the office she worked at, occasionally writing columns for a local newspaper. Journalism was an interesting and engaging career, she insisted, but it was obvious that she didn’t quite believe that herself. When Frank continued to ask her questions about her office job, she found that she didn’t have much to say. So, she started talking about the things she wrote in her free time, just for fun. 

"So you're writing a book?" Frank asked after she had told him about her newest project. She nodded shyly, waiting for him to tell her that it was foolish, that she was wasting her time and money. Gee nodded reluctantly in response. "That's fucking awesome! What's it about?" 

“Well, it’s more of a passion project. I- I haven’t exactly gotten around to getting it published or anything so… It’s not like it’s super important.” She looked down at her hands and felt her face flush for the thousandth time in the past hour. There was no way that Frank actually cared about any of this. He was just being polite, she insisted.

Frank frowned slightly. “No, of course it is. It’s clearly important to you, from the way you were talking about your work. I would love to hear more about it, if that’s okay?” 

It was almost jarring, his enthusiasm. He probably wondered why she came off so shy and had to be gently coaxed into talking about herself and her interests, her desires. She had briefly mentioned a breakup in passing, but Frank hadn't pressed then and he certainly didn't now. 

The afternoon quickly ate away at itself, as they talked, the conversation growing more animated and lively as the hours passed by. Before they knew it, the mid-afternoon rush had arrived for their daily fix before heading back out into the onslaught of traffic to face deadlines and other obligations. 

"You live close to this place right?" Frank asked with another winning smile as he pulled on his jacket, pushed in chair. Gee collected their empty cups and crumpled napkins, save for the one she had been doodling on for the past three hours. 

"I do, just a few blocks down the road," she replied as she turned to place the mugs in the cubby above a nearby trash can. When she looked back, Frank had the napkin in his hand and was smiling at it. She fought the urge to snatch it back before he started laughing at her and instead kept her hands at her sides. 

"Can I walk you home?" 

It was a question free of any expectations, although the naysaying voice within her continued to argue otherwise. If she had learned one thing about Frank in the short time that she had known him, it was that his kindness existed purely for kindness' sake. Somehow, this attracted her to him even more than any flattery or flirtation ever could. 

This realization was a startling one, but she ignored the knot in her stomach as she nodded and returned his smile. 

"Cool! I really love your drawing by the way," he said as he tried to hand the napkin back to her. 

"Keep it," she said. She opened the door for Frank as he followed her out of the cafe. 

"Really? But this is so awesome!" It was only a few simple sketches, based on their conversations and things Gee had noticed around the cafe, but he still regarded it like it was a treasured piece of art. 

"Yeah, I doodle stupid shit like that all the time," Gee said dismissively as Frank carefully tucked the napkin away in his wallet. 

"I don't think it's stupid, I think it's fucking awesome. You're really talented, Gee." 

This wasn't something she heard often. She had stopped drawing for a while when she was with Alex. It hadn't seemed important back then, because it wasn't something that he deemed to be so. Even after all this time, she still had trouble distinguishing which thoughts were her own and which ones had taken root after years of shame and abuse. 

As they walked down the block, Gee found herself lost in quiet contemplation. Frank could probably tell that something was on her mind, but he didn't press. She knew she would tell him in time, when the dust that had risen from pulling old baggage off the shelf settled. Instead, he told small jokes to make her laugh, to pull her out of her head. He told her about his dog, his family, the movies that they all watched together every Christmas. 

When she reached down to hold his hand, she found that she didn't even think about it. Frank instinctively, curled his fingers around hers and gave her palm a light squeeze. It made her stomach flutter, the way he glanced down at her for a moment, and smiled, before continuing his story. Like it was easy, like it was already second nature for him, too. 

When they got to her apartment, Gee hardly paused at the building's entrance. "Do you um want to come inside?"

Frank's smile was brighter than the afternoon sun right then. It was the same one he had given her that night at the club, with the same amount of intensity and tenderness. It made her feel beautiful, exactly as she was. It made her feel  _ seen _ .

"I would love to, Gee." 

They were still holding hands as she led him through the building, finally looking forward after so many months of looking back. For the first time, the past felt like a distant dream, like something that didn't have a hold on her any longer; It was behind her. The future, it turned out, was brighter and more alluring than she could have ever possibly imagined as she gazed up into his kind eyes and kissed him softly.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! How are you? I've been meaning to finish this second part for a while, but it kept evolving into something different every time I tried to sit down and write it. 
> 
> I get way too much inspiration from Taylor Swift songs, but that's old news lol. I wanted to write a short story based on the song Begin Again because it's cute and Good (and Red is objectively her best album, fight me). The characters from the first part of this story fit so well into that dynamic, I couldn't help myself. I really liked how it became an exploration of identity and I think I'm going to write another part with these two in the future we'll see. :)


End file.
